I will only be preaching at BC this Sunday. Campus Church will be devoted to the Kids Christmas Program.

I know that Valentine’s Day is the annual holiday devoted to love, but have you ever noticed how much love is emphasized during the Christmas season? Love is definitely a word prominently displayed on Christmas decorations. It is one of our Advent Themes and it is the subject of countless Hallmark Christmas Movies. Not to take anything away from Valentine’s Day, but Christmas is the season of love – God’s love to us.
This Sunday we will look into the non-traditional Christmas passage of 1 John 4 where the doctrine of love is on full display. In our text we will clearly see the Advent of Jesus as an act of love from God to us. The interesting thing we will see in this passage is that the love we receive from God is designed to be shared through us to others. If we want to live with the assurance that we have received the love of God, we need to be willing to be a conduit of His love to others . . . in the same way God showed love to us. Join me this Sunday as we Share in the Gift of God’s Love.

Sunday is the start of Advent: the waiting for the arrival of the Christ child! This Advent our theme this year is The Gifts of Christmas, where we will focus each Sunday on the biblical concepts of Hope, Love, Joy, Peace and Christ. Gifts are found, shared, chosen, embraced and experienced: that is what we will do with these Gifts, starting with hope.

Find the Gift of HOPE! Advent and the birth of Jesus happens at the darkest time of the year, helping to create a backdrop of spiritual darkness that needs to be lifted. This Sunday we will reflect on the circumstances in which Jesus was born: it was a dark time. The people of Israel were searching for a sign that would give them hope. In the Advent of Jesus that hope was announced, first to Mary, then to the shepherds. They found the gift of hope in Jesus.

People today are searching for a sign of hope as well. They may not be looking to scripture or even something religious, but they are nonetheless searching for hope. You may be one of those people. The Advent season affords us the opportunity to look deeply into the significance of the birth of Jesus. Advent invites us all to find not only hope in Jesus, but to also understand that Jesus came to fulfill the aspirations of our hopes. Jesus came, not to be served like other rulers, but to serve others. He came not to condemn us for our sins but to save us from our sins. Jesus came not to just make life more tolerable, but to give us a new life with eternal dimensions. That is the kind of hope we are considering this Sunday as we explore The Gifts of Christmas! Join us this Sunday as we Find the Gift of HOPE!

How did our denomination get the name Baptist? As you might guess it has a lot to do with the practice of baptism. The Massachusetts Puritans came to the New World in search of religious freedom. They were able to practice the kind of religion they wanted, but interestingly they restricted other religions and expressions of Christianity. In 1638, when a young minister named Roger Williams became convicted that biblical baptism was to be by full immersion, he was directed by the Puritan Church leaders to practice that form of baptism outside of their jurisdiction in what we now know as Providence Rhode Island. I believe this to be the beginning of the freedom of religion in America and what has been such a crucial part in the formation of America.
Baptism is a lot more than just getting wet. Baptism is the entrance into the church and comes with deep spiritual as well as theological importance. In Romans 6 St. Paul does a masterful job of connecting spiritual baptism with water baptism and the significance they have in the believer’s life. If you’ve been to a baptism, it’s not hard to see how Baptism by immersion is a very visual demonstration of the Death, Burrial and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Baptism is also a very public testimony of the transforming Gospel in an individuals life. Join me this Sunday as we that a deep dive (pardon the pun) in to the doctrine and practice of Baptism.

In this postmodern, post-Christian, western, English speaking world we live in, we use the word “love” way too casually. We use it to describe how we feel about the pizza we are eating and in the same breath will tell our spouse – I love you. I hope we are not putting the love of pizza on the same level as the love of our spouses. How we use the word love requires an understanding of the context within which it is used because we tend to infer much of the meaning.

When the word love is used in the Hebrew or Greek languages the Bible was originally written in, love was not used casually. Love was used to express a choice of commitment and devotion to the object of that love. So, in Psalm 119:97 when the Psalmist proclaims “Oh how I love your law!”, he was not comparing scripture to pizza. The Psalmist was declaring his deep commitment to and admiration for the Word of God. The Psalms are the Jewish hymnbook of the Old Testament, and like many songs written today, they express strong emotion such as love. Most of you reading this blog are not song writers and I would guess you don’t often express strong feelings of love like they do in a song. And yet we are called to follow the teaching and pattern that we see in Scripture which begs the question, “How do you fall in love with the Bible?”. Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible, provides the answer for us. Sunday we will look at part of Psalm 119, then in your community groups you will tackle another part of the Psalm, helping us map out a path to falling in love with the Bible. And yes, I’ll say it – Ya Gotta Love this Book! You have to love the Bible if you are ever going to grow from it. Join me this Sunday as we take a bold step toward loving this book more deeply.

The Bible: The Divinely Inspired Word of God, comprising 66 books that were written by 40 human authors over almost 1500 years of time, covering all of human history. The Bible was written to various different cultures, not to mention the diverse geo-political situations on the earth. It would be natural to think the Bible is a fragmented book that records specific eras of history, throwing in some philosophy to make it interesting. To the contrary, the Bible is a unified book that tells one marvelous story. You ask how that can be? We need to remember that the divine author is also the divine sovereign who rules over all of human history to work His divine purposes for all that He has created. The Bible conveys that one story of History that is His-story.

To help us see this on Sunday I want to take us back to High School literature class, using the parts of a good story, I want us to see how the Bible tells a unified story. A story that is true and continues to point people to the message of God’s power, righteousness, love, mercy and grace. Join me this Sunday for the Big Picture Look at what the Bible is telling us about God, the world we live in and ourselves.

On Sunday night I didn’t get the rest I needed after a long day. You would think I would have rested extremely well considering I had been up since 5 am and didn’t  really stop until 14 hours later, about an hour before I went to bed Sunday night. But I didn’t rest well at all. Why was that? I know why . . . I had spent the entire day, going from one task to another, multitasking just to stay on top of what I needed to do to get through the busiest single day of the year for me. When it came time for me to shut down for the night, I couldn’t find the rest I needed. Thankfully, I have slept extremely well the rest of the week. 

Our text this Sunday, Hebrews 3 & 4 talks about the need for rest; spiritual rest.  Spiritual rest comes when the believer stops their self-efforts of righteousness and rests in the finished work of Christ. The writer of Hebrews issues a warning that if we fail to hear and obey the Word of God, we will miss this rest. In place of this spiritual rest, people strive in their own self effort, trying to gain for themselves what only God can provide for them. Self-effort is part of our fallen condition and is very hard to completely abandon. What can be done to find a better rest?

Hebrews 4:12-16 provides the path to finding true and lasting rest. It begins with letting the Word of God do spiritual surgery on us that allows God to perform the needed healing. Join me this Sunday to see the powerful effect reading the Word of God can have on your life, and the rest you will find. 

Reading and understanding the Bible does not come naturally to any of us. There are several factors working against us:
The Devil doesn’t want you reading the Bible, so that means there is a spiritual opposition to reading and understanding the Bible.
The Bible was written between 2000 – 3500 years ago, in a different language, referencing different cultural nuances that are unfamiliar to us. Let’s face facts, the Bible is really old.
Last week we learned that the Bible has 40 different human authors with different writing styles.
The Bible has many different literary styles, some of which we would never read in any other aspect of our life. The apocalyptic writings are very hard, but even the Gospels can be hard if we don’t understand that the Gospel is a particular literary genre from that time period that we don’t have today.
I could go on . . . but you get the idea.

If you can relate, don’t be discouraged. I have a message of hope for you this Sunday: that you can read and understand the Bible. This week our entire church will be introduced to a method of reading the Bible that will help anyone better understand what they are reading in the Bible. It’s called the 7 Arrows of Bible Reading. The 7 Arrows prompts 7 questions to ask as you read a passage of scripture. For my message this week I will preach from Philippians 1:1-11, using the 7 Arrows method to unlock the meaning of the passage. Then, in the Community Group meetings, you will receive some teaching and coaching on how to do this yourself.

I’m going to guess that most of you have never had anyone teach you a simple way to effectively read the Bible. This Sunday, you will have an opportunity to change that. We want to help you be able to Read and Understand the Bible on your own, experiencing the life transforming power of God’s Word.

Philippians Introduction